No Pain No Gain

Tag Archives: white

In my opinion, a good website must have a user friendly design. For example, easy layouts for user to understand the structure of the page, clean colors that are just easy enough for people to read what the text is saying.

The website I choose is a personal website for a photographer named Andi Mayr. The reason why I choose his website is because the colors that Andi choose is clean and the layout is really simple and straightforward.

On the top of the starting page, there is Andi’s name and his job title; in the middle, it has four rectangular photos that are projects of the photographer that represents categories of human, landscape, sports, and random; at the bottom, there are other categories that Andi provided to viewers (and the mountain icon is a link to the main page). I think Andi puts the four pictures in the middle because they are the four most viewed categories that people view on his webpage. I think Andi makes these categories as four huge pictures because he wants these to stand out from everything else that makes viewers easy to select since it is the four most viewed categories. In addition, when your mouse stops at one of the pictures, the picture will fade and become whitish, then underlined and capitalized words will come out. This makes viewers more easy to select things that they want to view at. In the middle of the four pictures, there is a diamond that I guess is his logo. Overall, the main page is straightforward of its ideas and it gives us a simple and clean feeling.

Then when I choose one of the category pictures, it will lead me to its gallery. When its loading, Andi’s logo will pop up and continue flashing until the page is done loading. I think this is really cool because on one hand it is indicating the age is loading, and on the other hand, by making the logo as a loading icon will make viewers remember his logo. After the page is loaded to the gallery section, the page then turns into a page that has other category links at the top, in the middle there is an individual picture, and the bottom remains the same (except they added a button to the top). In order to see other pictures, you need to scroll down, but it always lets one picture to show at the time (that it has a pull back effect). I think the point of Andi doing this, to remain the page as clean and simple as possible for the views to review his projects.

In his films section, which is usually shoots commercials, combines both of his front page and photo gallery concept. The layout is the same as the photo gallery, but when we leave our mouse on the film snapshot, the photos will fade and the background will turn into white with black words on them. The text contains the name of the film, the producer, the director, and the actors.

For color choices, Andi did a good job. The basic colors of his webpage is black and white except one place that he has a red heart to show acknowledgments of Lena & Flo for producing his webpage with him. Black and white is one of the most classic colors to show high contrast and simple. Personally, I like to use this color a lot because by using this color it gives me a feeling that the whole work is simple.

Colors and layout are two really important elements in website design. The concept of web design is to be simple and straightforward. Although you can have complicated combinations and fancy colors, it is easier for a viewer to understand the content in the webpage if you have a clean layout and contrasted simple colors (or not colors that are hard to read). So I think Andi did a good job of designing hisj personal webpage with Lena & Flo.

I think the music video Transcendence by Lindsey Stirling is really awesome, although the storyline of this music video is a little bit weird. It is about Lindsey wearing a white dress, and a fashion designer changing clothes on his computer and the computer connects to a projector that is on Lindsey. But what makes it weird is that both of them are not in the same place, so they cannot see, touch, feel each other: they are disconnected. What is interesting is that the emotion of the two characters are somehow are connected, but in an opposite way. For instance, at one place when Lindsey is smiling after she noticed that the fashion designer no longer controls her; however, the fashion designer acted to be shocked and scared and went to check the computer immediately. There are also other scenes in the video that the two character’s expression is linked together that makes the whole video interesting.

In the beginning of this music video, the fashion designer is controlling the clothes that Lindsey is wearing. But as Lindsey picked up a violin on the ground, the whole situation changed. The clothes that are displayed on the dress changes when she is playing the violin (instead of when the fashion designer is clicking on different clothes that changes the display of the clothes). After knowing that her clothes will not change anymore, which is when other people’s clothes are flashing and the clothes on herself is not, Lindsey begin to play her violin which make her dominate the selection of clothes that eventually drives the fashion designer crazy. On the other hand, when the fashion designer is crazy pulling out cords of the computer, the video uses low angle to make the fashion designer to look bigger and fierce. At the time when the fashion designer is totally crazy, the camera moves while he is smashing the keyboard, and pulling out the mouse cable, which makes the whole scene wild. The scenes also have some crazy camera switches between what is happening to the designer and the spotlight, which eventually turn out to be a flash, and the whole scene comes back to Lindsey.

To emphasize both character’s expression, the video uses lots of middle close ups to close ups with zoom ins and zoom outs on the character. For Lindsey, it is mostly middle close ups because we want to see how joyful she is when she is playing the violin; but for the fashion designer, it is mostly close ups to express his frustration and craziness. In the video, Lindsey is also interacting with the people and object that are displayed on the background. She gets a beer when somebody is handing her one, copied the clothes that someone else is wearing when she is touching it, and she wonders around the crowd people are passing by her. It is also interesting that in the end, the whole scene changed all into white, except the violin that she has on her hand. I think the director did this purposely because the director wants to emphasize the violin as an important role of her to be free in the music video, which also the violin is the main melody in the whole music.